“In my hometown when I started singing a lot of people were like, oh she has a nice voice, but she’s really fat,” Halimi recounts. “And when you’re a teenager that does touch you emotionally a lot. So it came to the point where I was like, I can make a change for myself and I can do better for myself.”

With the help of a personal trainer, who she later married, Halimi says she dropped the weight with, “a lot of working out, a lot of dieting.”